A GROUP of maverick scientists believe an experiment aimed at replicating the Big Bang will lead to the destruction of the planet when it is turned on later this week. The Large Hadron Collider – a £4bn, 18-mile-long atom-smasher buried 300ft underg
round on the Swiss-French border, above – is to be used to probe the secrets of the forces and particles that make up the universe.
The multinational European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), which has spearheaded the project, hopes a series of collisions between packets of heavy sub-atomic particles, or hadrons, could provide the first real proof of the existence of the Higgs particle, which is thought to be what gives matter its weight. They also believe it could give us access to hitherto unknown dimensions.
If the experiment goes to plan, Scottish physicist Peter Higgs, who first mooted the possibility of the elusive particle, will probably be nominated for the Nobel Prize. Alternatively, if the experiment goes wrong, the LHC might conjure up a black hole which will fall into the ground and swallow the earth. Or it might trigger a catastrophic chain reaction in the very fabric of space and time which will rip apart the entire universe like the skin of a bursting balloon. Could be interesting.
2 ASTEROID STRIKEEvery few years, it seems, Nasa scientists warn us a giant asteroid capable of wiping out the human race is on a potential collision course with Earth. A few years ago the potential interloper was Apophis, a 390-metre chunk of rock or space debris which, it was feared, might hit the Earth in 2036, releasing energy equivalent to 100,000 Hiroshimas and snuffing us out like a candle.
Although scare stories such as these tend to fade after a couple of months (as scientists realise said asteroid will miss us by a few billion miles), this Doomsday scenario is one of the most frightening because there are so many asteroids out there. Indeed, the odds of dying in an asteroid-related accident are thought to be as high as one in 500,000 – the same as the odds of dying in a tsunami.
How much damage an asteroid strike would do, however, would depend on what size it was, where it fell and whether it reached the ground or exploded above the Earth. In 1908, for example, an asteroid no bigger than the White House, but moving at 40 to 50 times the speed of sound exploded around 6km above Tunguska in Siberia, flattening 800 square miles of forest. If it had fallen over Scotland it could have wiped out the whole of the Central Belt.
Nasa scientists have begun a project to identify, catalogue and track 90% of all potentially hazardous objects greater than 140m in diameter by the end of 2020.
3 ROGUE BLACK HOLESEver since Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking proved the existence of black holes, left, in 1970, they have been a source of terror for those with lively imaginations. Despite being invisible, black holes – regions of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can escape – can be detected by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit its centre. Or, through terrestrial and Earth-orbiting telescopes, it may be possible to see gas (from a nearby star, for instance) that is being sucked into it.
Thankfully, most black holes are in orbit around other astronomical masses, but space is a chaotic place. If one of them was to pull itself out of its orbit and enter our solar system it would cause havoc, distorting the planetary orbits, causing extreme climate changes and perhaps even expelling some planets from the system. The frightening thing is there are thought to be 10 million collapsed stars waiting to turn into black holes in our galaxy, the Milky Way, alone.
4 THE GREY GOO THEORYIn his 1986 book Engines Of Creation, Eric Drexler, an expert in molecular nanotechnology, postulated that self-replicating robots able to break down biological material might run amok turning the Earth to grey goo – a process known as ecophagy. Despite the fact there are scarier and more convincing scenarios in the average episode of Dr Who, the prospect inspired a generation of science fiction writers to create apocalyptic adventures in which the world was turned to a myriad different varieties of mush.
Grey goo was one of the scenarios referred to in a book by Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, in which he gave humanity a 50-50 chance of surviving the century. Drexler's apocalyptic warning had a huge impact on the field – leading, he claims, to "false scientific denials of feasible technologies".
Recently he has distanced himself from his original claims, pointing out that self-replicating machines are needlessly complex and inefficient (as well as a trifle risky). A much greater danger, it is now believed, is that nanotechnology will be used to create a fourth generation of nuclear weapons.
5 NUCLEAR HOLOCAUSTEver since the atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the spectre of a nuclear holocaust – the complete eradication of civilisation by nuclear warfare – has cast a pall over the world. Throughout the Cold War, fears that someone would "press the button" found expression in books such as Raymond Briggs' When The Wind Blows and TV dramas such as Threads, which showed the devastating effect that radiation and climate change would have on the planet in the event of a nuclear strike.
The fear of a nuclear holocaust receded slightly with the collapse of communism, although there are still an estimated 20,000 active nuclear weapons across the globe and tensions resurface whenever there is fresh hostility between the superpowers. More recently, however, doomsayers have been more preoccupied with the prospect of biological and chemical warfare – the use of any pathogen (bacterium, virus or other disease-causing organism) as a weapon of war. Killer germs are cheap, easy to produce and conceal, and difficult to control.
6 GAMMA RAY BURSTSGamma ray bursts are extremely powerful luminous electromagnetic events created by the collision of two collapsed stars. They are almost impossible to predict and are said to have 10 quadrillion times more energy than the sun. Since at least one burst can be seen each day when watching our sky with gamma ray vision, some scientists reckon it can't be too long before there is one closer to home.
The good news is that a gamma ray burst would only cover half the Earth since the other half would be in shadow. The bad news is a sufficiently close gamma ray burst (1,000 light years away, say) would result in serious damage to the atmosphere, shutting down communications (due to electromagnetic disturbances) and instantly wiping out half the ozone layer. These effects could spread to the other side of the Earth, severely diminish the global food supply and result in long-term climate and atmospheric changes, wiping out 90% of the population.
7 BUBBLE NUCLEATION, OR FALSE VACUUM THEORYAccording to the leading cosmological model, the universe began as a false vacuum of empty space filled with energy. This incredibly unstable, high-energy state went through the process of "bubble nucleation" to reach a more stable, lower-energy state. This huge release of energy caused the expansion of the universe. We would like to think that the world we now live in is a stable true vacuum, but it is possible that although the universe is at a lower energy level now than it was before, we are living in another false vacuum which could collapse at any moment. If a low energy bubble nucleates in our false vacuum it would expand at the speed of light, once again changing the universe.
8 THE COLLAPSE OF THE ECOSYSTEMThis is the guilt-trippers' favourite, below, as it's the only one for which ordinary citizens could be held personally accountable. According to this theory, the consequences of man's selfish and destructive behaviour will cause the collapse of the ecosystem and the end of the world by the middle of the century. When we hunt animals, tear down forests, transport organisms from their original ecosystem to others and introduce synthetic materials into the environment, we are upsetting the delicate balance of life on the planet. Our refusal to reduce our carbon footprint has led to a thinning of the ozone layer and climate change on a dramatic and potentially cataclysmic scale. At least 30,000 species become extinct each year – a higher rate than ever before in history. Some believe the eventual results of our greed could be catastrophic: the extinction of pollinating insects, for example, leading to widespread crop failure and eventual starvation.
The calamities that never wereTHE Y2K BUGAs revellers ushered in the new millennium, businesses across the world braced themselves for the onslaught of the Y2K bug – a predicted IT disaster on an epic scale. It had been thought that the change of year from 99 to 00 would cause computer systems everywhere to malfunction and planes to fall out of the sky, but in the end everything carried on pretty much as before.
ALIEN INVASIONOn October 30, 1938, hundreds of Americans fled their homes when news of a Martian invasion was relayed to listeners in a series of bulletins on the CBS radio network. Only later did it become clear the broadcast was in fact a radio production of HG Wells' novel War Of The Worlds, directed and narrated by Orson Welles.
THE ATOM-BOMB THEORYEdward Teller, one of the scientists involved in creating the first atom bomb, became convinced there was a chance it would ignite the earth's atmosphere because of a hypothetical fusion reaction of nitrogen nuclei. The calculations he produced to prove his point were later shown to be wrong, but even when the first tests were being carried out in New Mexico, some of those present were taking bets on whether or not it would happen.
END OF THE WORLD CULTMichael Travesser – the leader of a cult in a remote corner of New Mexico – believed the world would end at midnight on October 31, 2007. He spent 20 years preparing his 56 devoted followers for the Apocalypse and allowed a Channel 4 documentary team to follow him in the months leading up to it. It was something of an anticlimax, however, when the appointed hour arrived and absolutely nothing happened.
The full article contains 1765 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
